The Solution:
Ctrl + J
Press Clear all on the top right hand side of the screen
Why it works:
This error is due to google chrome being unable to find the last location that you saved a downloaded file to.
By performing the fix above you are clearing chrome's memory of what that last location was.
How this could be made clearer:
The error message the google chrome throws up is super vague.
It tells you that it can't find the hard disk which sounds like it's unable to find the internal hard drive.
This isn't what it means.
It would be clearer if it specified the path that it was unable to find rather than simply telling you it is unable to find something.
chrome.exe - No Disk There is no disk in the drive. Please insert a disk into drive \Device\Harddisk1\DR3. Cancel - Try Again - Continu
This morning I received a good old fashioned phishing request from someone pretending to be from ASB. I have included the message at the bottom of the post but first here are some reasons to believe it is a scam:
- The e-mail was sent to undisclosed recipeints meaning that the exact same message gas been sent to multiple people
- Details specific to me and/or my account are not mentioned
- BANKS WILL NEVER ASK YOU TO DO SOMETHING LIKE THIS
- My account has not been deactivated (you can check to see if your account is still active by heading to your banks website directly (not via a link) and trying to log in.
- The e-mail address is a string of incoherent letters and is not associated with the asb.co.nz domain
- The click here link does not take you to any part of asb.co.nz, instead it takes you to http://mail.edutech.com/asb-online/asb-co-nz/ <- Don't go here
From: wgtsxy@online.com
Subject: Notification
We would like to inform you that your registration for your ASB Bank online profile needs to be updated. Due to security issues, your account has been deactivated and you are no longer able to access our online features. To access your profile, please visit ASB Bank now by clicking here>
You are receiving this email notification because this email address is listed as the administrative contact email for your ASB Bank.
Version 2: From: me@locahost.com to: me We would like to inform you that your registration for your ASB Bank online profile needs to be updated. Due to security issues, your account has been deactivated and you are no longer able to access our online features. To access your profile, please visit ASB Bank now by clicking here>
You are receiving this email notification because this email address is listed as the administrative contact email for your ASB Bank.
While you probably know that you should put your money into your glass and you probably know that a longer focal length translates to a more telephoto/zoomy lens you may not know how the numbers written on the outside of your lens relate to the underlying physics or even how the lens ensure that images end up on your sensor/film rather than somewhere else in space. These things are worth knowing as they feed into deeper concepts further down the line. Luckily, they're actually very easy to understand.
A Basic Photography Lens
A basic photography lens has 2 key properties:
- It is a converging lens
- It has a focal length
Both of these properties are shown in the diagrams that are commonly used to represent lenses
Photography lenses are converging lenses
Photography lenses are converging lenses. This means that light entering the lens bends (or converges) toward the middle of the lens. This is an important property of lenses as it is this convergence of light that allows images to be captured on the film or sensor that sits behind the lens. This convergence also contributes to the circle of confusion associated with light coming from any single source.
Photography Lenses have a focal length
The focal length is the distance between the lens and the point at which light entering the lens converges. In the case of cameras this doubles as the distance between the lens and the film or sensor as we want the light to converge on the film or sensor in order to be able to take well focussed images.
So far so good. But how do all the numbers and moving parts fit in?
The Role of the Focus Ring
The Focus Ring allows the photographer to adjust the point at which the light rays converge after passing through the lens.
Zoom lenses
Zoom lenses have a variable focal length. While this could be achieved by moving the lens further from the film or image sensor it is usually achieved (at least in part) through the inclusion of additional lens elements in the zoom itself. These additional elements bend light inwards (converging) or outwards (diverging) as required.
The 1:X number - The Aperture Number(s)
This number (or these numbers) show the F number associated with the largest aperture(s) for a given lens. In the case of prime lenses or zoom lenses with a constant maximum aperture only 1 value will be shown. In the case of zoom lenses that do not have a constant maximum aperture the range of aperture values will be shown. Aperture values themselves are a ratio of the diameter of the opening compared to the focal length of the lens (focal length/Aperture diameter). The 1 in the 1:X represents the focal length of your lens while the X represents relative size of the aperture. In a 1:1 lens the aperture's maximum diameter is equal to the lens's focal length. As the X gets larger the diameter gets smaller.
Zoom Lenses and Variable Apertures - Why?
Remember that the F number is the ratio of focal length to the diameter of the aperture. Unless elements inside the lens are compensating for the variation in the focal length the F number will have to increase as the focal length increases.
Despite sounding like group therapy for dementia patients the circle of confusion is a remarkably simple concept to grasp. It is often talked about as an unfocussed spot of light produced from a cone of light.
If you think about how light travels through a lens and the cones that it produces in doing so it soon becomes clear that the circle of confusion produced by objects at different distances from a lens will produce different circles of confusion when the recording medium is at different distances from the lens. Any combination that creates a circle of confusion that is too small for our eyes to resolve appears as a single crisp spot and is deemed to be in focus. Any combination that produces a larger circle of confusion is deemed to be more out of focus.
In this way the circle of confusion is related to the depth of field. Any circle of confusion that produces a finer resolution than our eye is deemed to be in focus.
As the circle of confusion essentially relates to the image that gets recorded on a sensor or frame of film it is calculated in relation to the size of the sensor or frame of film. Commonly the diagonal length of the recording medium is divided by 1000 or 1500. In the case of a Nikon APS-C sensor the value obtained by dividing the diagonal by 1500 is 0.019
Over the years, in addition to an interest in photography, I have developed an interest in science. I love reading about and discovering the relationship between different variables and there is nothing more exciting than when that relationship can be boiled down to a clean equation. Luckily for me Photography is essentially applied physics and, as physics is also in love with equations, this means photography has plenty of lovely equations for those keen enough to be interested in them. As I am not a formal student of photography I have not been exposed to these equations so I am currently collecting them as part of my learning process and also with an eye to a wee project I'm working on.
Calculating Depth of Field
Depth of field is something that many amateur photographers express an interest in. Often they will tell you that an image has great depth of field or a lovely shallow depth of field but it is far rarer for them to say that the depth of field is 143mm. Depth of field refers to the amount of an image that appears to be in sharp focus. It has depth because the image is produced by light bouncing off objects in the real world. The distance from where sharp focus begins on an object to where it ends on an object gives us our measure of depth. Hence, depth of field.
While most photographers quickly learn the general relationship between focal length, aperture, subject distance, and depth of field physics allows us to specify it exactly. That being said the first step to making this determination comes from defining something else, the circle of confusion. For our purposes, we will use the circle of confusion value for an APS-C (crop) sensor. 0.019948
The next step is to determine the hyperfocal distance of the lens. The hyperfocal distance is the point at which an object at infinity appears sufficiently sharp when photographed. It varies with focal length, aperture, and the circle of confusion and is defined below:
Focal Length2/(Aperture x Circle of Confusion)
While hyperfocal distance alone tells us little about the depth of field produced by the factors mentioned ealrier it is calculated first as its value is required when calculating the nearest and furthest focal point. The distance between the nearest and furthest focal point being the depth of field.
Nearest Focal Point = (Hyperfocal*distance to subject)/(Hyperfocal+(distance to subject - focal length))
Furthest Focal Point = (Hyperfocal*distance to subject)/(Hyperfocal-(distance to subject - focal length))
Depth of Field = Furthest Focal Point - Nearest Focal Point
This video and the the description that accompanies it on YouTube tell the story of how Joshua Bell (a famous violinist who played to a sold out audience the night before) played Bach on a $3.5 million violin in a Subway at Rush hour and almost nobody noticed.
It is presented as an experiment, which you might be able to justify if you incorrectly defined an experiment as doing something and checking to see what happened without worrying about why it happened, with astounding results. However what is truly remarkable is that it is neither an experiment nor an event with astounding results. Here's why:
It's not an experiment
In an experiment you try to test an idea. You do this by carefully adjusting one variable in a situation at a time while holding everything else constant. In an experiment you are in control and you measure the effect that changes you make to one thing (say the price of the violin in this case) have on the measure that you are interested in (people's tendency to stop and listen). Here's why the situation they describe is, at best, an awful experiment or, most accurately, an anecdotal observation
A comparison is made between the people in the Subway and the people in the concert hall the previous night. It is noted that those in the Concert Hall sat and listened intently to the performance while those in the subway did not. The reasons for this difference is suggested to be that when we don't have time to appreciate beauty we don't appreciate it. While this is possible it is by no means proven and this 'experiment' is incapable of addressing this idea. Why? It has failed to control for, and therefore has failed to rule out, the 4 following potential explanations among many others:
1) The audience
The people in the Subway and the people in the concert hall are, in all likelihood, not the same people. As such there are any number of potential reasons for them not stopping to listen to the music. While the fact that it is rush hour may be one of these other plausible explanations include a different taste in music, a dislike of subway stations (reducing the total beauty content of the situation), and even a higher proportion of deaf people (deaf people are unlikely to be well represented at a concert). These are just a few reasons.
2) The beauty signals
Those attending the concert the night before would have been given all kinds of signals about how beautiful they should think the music was. For one thing they probably knew what was going to be played, who was going to play it, and how much they had to pay for a ticket. The combination of all these branding elements sends a stronger signal to pay attention to what is happening than a guy standing in casual dress in a subway station does. As such it is entirely possible that it wasn't the time pressure that stopped people perceiving the beauty but the fact that the performance itself may have less beauty in it than we would otherwise expect.
3) The measure doesn't match the conclusion
This one is actually the most important of the bunch. While the authors talk about our inability to notice beauty this is not what they actually measured. They didn't stop anyone and ask if they noticed the music and, if so, what they thought of it. They measured the length of time people stopped for and the amount of money they placed in the violinist's case.
4) The change in sound Quality
A quiet concert hall sounds far different to a busy subway station at rush hour. If people were less likely to notice the beautiful music in the subway station it could be because it was less audible over the surrounding noise or it could even be that the acoustics of the station itself made the music sound less beautiful. This failure to control the quality of what your testing with is a fatal flaw.
It's not actually surprising
While the reasons I have outlined above are probably enough to convince anyone that the experiment performed by the Washington Post was destined to succeed in finding a difference between the number of people listening to a violinist play a piece in a concert hall and the number of people listening to the same violinist playing in a subway there are a number of other things to keep in mind. These findings are well established through strong experimental testing but are somewhat less sexy than a violinist in a subway when addressed in isolation.
1) The best predictor of whether someone will stop for someone else is whether they are in a hurry or not
There is a famous psychological experiment that pitted priests in training against the general public. Who would be the most likely to stop and help someone in need? As it turns out, whichever person was not in a hurry. Stopping then appears to be a function of hurry.
2) Conformity
Like it or not we try not to be special unique snowflakes. Instead we try to fit in with what everyone else is doing. If everyone else at the concert is listening to the musician so do we. If everyone else is ignoring him and trying to get to work, so do we. We even engage in behaviours that run completely opposite to our own beliefs.
3) Schemas
We tend to act the way we think we should act in any given situation. In a subway we think we should be in transit so we travel from point A to point B. When in a concert hall we think we should listen attentively to the music and appreciate its beauty even if we don't really know what that means. When we see someone dressed casually playing in a subway with no indicators of importance we take this to mean that they are a busker. When we see someone dressed well in a concert hall we take this to mean they are a professional. As such behaviour doesn't really give much of a clue as to what we think of the music or whether we notice. It is probably a better indicator of how we think we should behave.
4) Most people are useless at discriminating between high and low quality unless they have specialist knowledge.
Note in the description of the video they seem to suggest that the violin should be beautiful and produce beautful music because it costs $3.5 million. If we recorded music from that violin and a cheaper violin under equal controlled conditions and presented it to the author of the article and a few hundred other people without telling them which was which do you think they would be able to tell the difference? In most cases the answer would be no. This does not suggest that we can't identify beautiful music in a Subway station because it's in a subway station. Instead it suggests we can't tell the difference between beautiful music and non-beautiful music unless we are told that the music will be beautiful or not beautiful. If it's being played in a concert hall we are likely to think it must be beautiful because the setting tells us so. If it is being played in a subway we might think the person playing it is quite talented but, because they're in a subway, obviously they're not that talented and the music then can't be that beautiful.
Taking these factors into account the results are not surprising in the least and also do not suggest that rushing it what causes us to miss beauty. It may mean we are less likely to stop but that is not the same as saying that we do not notice it.
Maybe their results just mean that Bach being played on a 3.5 million dollar violin isn't actually that beautiful to most people
That is an equally valid interpretation of the same data. This time instead of blaming the public for being too busy I'm blaming the classical music crowd for being out of touch. Instead of saying "Aha! When people are in a hurry they don't notice beauty" I have said "Aha! When people have nothing else to do and have paid to listen to music that they like enough to pay money for they are more likely to listen to that music".
If you found this web page chances are you found it using google.
Furthermore you probably clicked on it because it was ranked high enough on google for you to see it.
How can you get a similarly high google ranking for your photography site? If you have done a bit of reading about Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and how it can help in improving your google ranking you've probably found that most people suggest that the basics of SEO are fairly simple. You increase the number of inbound links to your website and optimise your site for google. While both of these things are entirely correct the challenge in optimising a photography site lies in understanding that what we have been taught about images doesn't hold when we talk about google; rather than an image being worth a thousand words most images on the web aren't even worth one.
How then can you take your photography website and increase its google ranking? The tricks lie in transorming your images from mere coloured pixels to information rich, quality content.
Beyond these standard points you should also consider what you're trying to get to page one for. If you're just starting out you're not going to get to the number one spot for any highly competitive search term. For example chasing after the search term Wedding Photographer will be a spirit crushingly impossible mission. Instead try to focus on something specific, preferably something that makes you unique. This could be the geographical area in which you operate, the way you shoot, or even the way you write. Once you develop one foothold it will be easier to create others.
